Case Study
FTI Technology Transforms Customer Service Chats Into Defensible Legal Evidence
A leading AI search and knowledge company faced an urgent legal review requiring analysis of customer service history stored in its help desk system Intercom. FTI Technology’s emerging data sources and digital forensics experts were engaged to help the client navigate collection and review complexities under a tight deadline.
Situation
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud-based communication and customer service platforms, legal teams face growing challenges in extracting, processing and reviewing data from these systems. Native export capabilities often prioritize machine readability over human usability, creating significant obstacles during litigation, regulatory response and compliance audits. In this instance, the client faced a critical roadblock when the native export functions in its Intercom system couldn’t deliver review-ready data at scale to enable legal review.
Several logistical obstacles arose when attempting to export Intercom history into the legal team’s e-discovery and review platform. These included:
- Bulk export limitation
Mass exports of team mailboxes were only available in raw JSON format, a machine-oriented structure unsuitable for human review. - Readability limitation
Generating PDF exports of conversation threads from Intercom required manual, one-by-one downloads from the user interface, an impossible task given the volume of data that was potentially relevant to the litigation. - Timeline pressure
With only two weeks to prepare and analyze the data, traditional manual approaches were not sufficient.
To meet the scalability, data complexity and timeline needs, programmatic data manipulation was required to isolate target mailboxes in Intercom, extract conversation threads from bulk JSON and convert them into a format compatible with legal review software and discovery workflows.
Our Role
FTI Technology has more than a decade of experience leading innovations in emerging data sources challenges and an even longer history of solving complex data issues in discovery and digital forensics. A team of experts developed a custom solution to help defensibly transform 120GB of the client’s raw JSON data from Intercom into 12,000 reviewable documents in only one week.
The solution included:
- Discovery and scoping, working closely with outside counsel and the client’s IT department to identify specific teams, mailboxes and timeframes relevant to the litigation.
- Technical navigation of Intercom’s API and export limitations to securely execute bulk extraction of raw JSON data and CSV mailbox inventories while maintaining strict chain of custody protocols for defensibility.
- A custom extract, transform, load pipeline to parse JSON data, cull and deduplicate the dataset, and generate readable renderings with properly mapped metadata.
- Translation of more than 50 internal system codes into plain English.
- Differentiation of human agents vs. AI bot interactions within the Intercom system, and visual recreation of chats with role icons and timestamps.
- Reconstruction of conversation threading and chronology and advanced attachment matching to link images and documents to the corresponding messages despite cloud export issues including scrambled filenames, orphaned attachments, URL encoding and character limits.
- Secure handling of the custom extract, transform, load pipeline and data to maintain forensic integrity along every phase of the exercise.
Our Impact
The client and reviewing counsel specifically noted that FTI Technology's solution transformed what could have been an insurmountable data challenge into a manageable, efficient review process that supported their legal strategy. The approach delivered more than 85% reduction in the review population, provided substantial cost savings and made it possible for the client to defensibly respond to the litigation under aggressive deadlines.
The enhanced review experience transformed unreadable text data into visually accurate, properly organized document families, with inline images and screenshots preserved to offer critical context for understanding the content and intent within customer service interactions in question in the litigation.
FTI Technology’s ability to rapidly engineer custom solutions for emerging data sources ensured the client could conduct defensible discovery and analysis despite the limitations within their tool’s native export functionality.
The law firm handling the matter said, "The ability to process and correlate this unstructured data within the required turnaround time was a critical win for our litigation strategy. The visual clarity of the final deliverables — particularly the reconstructed chat interfaces — drastically reduced reviewer fatigue."